Sal McCloskey
Set your phasers to stunned — researchers in the Netherlands have made a landmark breakthrough in the field of quantum teleportation that could one day see human beings getting beamed from one point in space to another. While that level of technology is still a long way off, the science community is abuzz with the results of a new experiment published this week. The details behind the tests take some effort to get your head around, but essentially a team from the Delft University of Technology has successfully passed quantum data between electrons with 100 percent accuracy for the first time. This is only the states of particles we’re talking about, and only over a distance of 10 feet, but it’s still significant.
Star Trek-style ”beaming up” of people through space could become a reality sometime in the far future, the leader of a landmark teleportation experiment has said. Nothing in the laws of physics prevents the teleportation of large objects, including humans, Professor Ronald Hanson pointed out. In contrast, it is physically impossible for anything to travel faster than light. ”What we are teleporting is the state of a particle,” Prof Hanson, from Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, said. ”If you believe we are nothing more than a collection of atoms strung together in a particular way, then in principle it should be possible to teleport ourselves from one place to another. ”In practice it’s extremely unlikely, but to say it can never work is very dangerous. ”I would not rule it out because there’s no fundamental law of physics preventing it. ‘If it ever does happen it will be far in the future.” Prof Hanson’s team showed for the first time that it was possible to teleport information encoded into sub-atomic particles between two points three metres apart with 100% reliability.
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